Growing up in the 90s, I didn’t play video games. As a young child, I didn’t have any gaming consoles or even a computer. I had heard of Mario and Sonic, and that was about it. When I was about seven or eight, however, I started staying over at my aunt and uncle’s house once a month or so. My uncle had a PlayStation and I would often watch him playing Tomb Raider. I tried the game myself a few times but I found it all too intimidating, so I quickly went back to watching my uncle play instead. When we (and by that, I mean he) had completed Tomb Raider, we sometimes went to Blockbusters on a Friday night to rent out a new PlayStation game and a couple of VHSs.

The first video game that I think I personally owned was called Creatures 2, which actually came as a free gift with a computer magazine. If you don’t know what the Creatures franchise is, it’s basically a life simulation, whereby you have to hatch, raise, and breed cute, adorable little beings called Norns. The complexities of the game went way over my head and I didn’t really play it properly, but I loved the Norns and I loved the colourful world that they inhabited.

By this point, the new millennium was fast approaching. Pokémon was the thing that seemingly every kid was into – including me. I had been watching the Pokémon cartoon every Saturday morning for a while, and I had seen reviews and screenshots of the Pokémon games in one of my friend’s gaming magazine. I asked my parents for a Game Boy Colour and Pokémon Blue for Christmas that year. Even though that day occurred over 25 years ago now, I can still vividly remember opening my Game Boy on Christmas morning. The pure, unfiltered joy that I experienced as I hunched over the little Game Boy screen that evening is an emotion that I have rarely felt since. At that moment in time, nothing else mattered. I loved exploring the world, going into buildings as I pleased, speaking to everyone that I came across, and investigating all the nooks and crannies I could find.

The next year, I got a second-hand Nintendo 64. I played my first Mario game (Super Mario 64), my first Super Smash Bros. game, and my second Pokémon game (Pokémon Snap). When the next generation consoles came out in the early 2000s, I was torn between the Nintendo GameCube and the PS2. I eventually chose the PS2 and had a blast playing games such as The Simpsons Hit and Run and the criminally underappreciated Beyond Good and Evil, both of which had gorgeous semi-open worlds that I loved exploring. But one of my good friends had a GameCube, and after spending countless afternoons at his house playing Super Smash Bros. Melee with him and a few other pals, I managed to get a cheap GameCube of my own. I was soon introduced to the worlds of Super Mario Sunshine and Resident Evil.

Then, in 2005, I started playing a game that took up most of my gaming time. World of Warcraft. I was already invested in the world of Azeroth, having played both Warcraft II and Warcraft III by this point… but World of Warcraft allowed me to explore Azeroth in more detail than ever before – more detail than I could ever imagine. Suddenly, all of the characters, units, and buildings that were so familiar to me from the real-time strategy games in the series were right there in front of me, populating a world that I was also a part of. I spent a whole morning simply wandering around Stormwind City, doing nothing in particular, just taking in the sights and sounds. Never before had a game granted me so much freedom to go wherever I pleased and do whatever I wanted.

I’ve since learned that I’m not really fussed about weapons or stats in video games. I love to be immersed in a world, to explore, to wander off the beaten track. That’s not to say I don’t like a good, well-crafted, original boss battle, but I prefer soaking in the atmosphere of a game, seeing what animals populate its environments, trying to work out how alien cultures work. This blog will look at several games whose worlds I have particularly enjoyed over the past quarter of a century, from Azeroth and Raccoon City, to the Mushroom Kingdom and Albia.

But Nostalgic Worlds will be more than that. I’m also going to look at Mario Kart race tracks and Super Smash Bros. stages, to look at the little details and easter eggs included, and how they draw inspiration from earlier titles. I will be looking at various Pokémon to uncover their origins – biological, mythological, or otherwise. I’m going to examine the wildlife of the Star Wars universe. I aim to scourWorld of Warcraft to try and find all of the units and the buildings from the RTS games in the series. I will delve into Hogwarts Legacy in search of as many Harry Potter references as I can. I will look at my favourite items from The Sims. If I’m feeling particularly ambitious, I might even try and follow in the footsteps of Frodo Baggins in Lord of the Rings Online, travelling from Bag End all the way to Mordor. Hell, I will probably branch out and also look at movies that have interesting worlds at some point. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’m not the sort of person who says ‘They don’t make ’em like they used to’ when it comes to video games. I play modern games as much as the next person. But the games that I played during my formative years are the ones that have stayed with me, one way or another. I fully accept that this is more down to nostalgia rather than those games being significantly better than the ones I play today. Nostalgia can be very powerful. It’s a longing to return to a happier time or place. Usually, it’s a bittersweet feeling because you can’t actually return. But the great thing about games is that they offer a chance to revisit a virtual place from your past and experience old feelings. And I think that’s why I often go back to certain games every few years or so.

It’s almost impossible to fully recapture the magic you felt when you first played games from your childhood (not to mention the cultural zeitgeist), but I still get a warm, comforting feeling inside whenever I boot up one of those titles. I’m transported back, if only briefly, to a simpler, happier, more innocent time.

That’s what Nostalgic Worlds is all about.